LIdar Knowledge Europe (LIKE) fosters training and education of young researchers on emerging laser-based wind measurement technologies and its translation into industrial applications. Doppler Lidars (light detection and ranging) that measured the wind in the atmosphere remotely have reduced in price and increased reliability over the last decade mainly driven by European universities and companies serving the growing wind energy industry. This opens the possibility for new applications in many areas. LIKE improves, tests and refines the technology thus expanding these areas of application. LIKE promotes wind energy applications such as wind resource mapping using scanning lidars and control of individual wind turbines or entire wind farms in order to increase energy production and reduce mechanical loads. LIKE maps unusual atmospheric flow patterns over airports in real-time and thus improves the safety of landing aircrafts. LIKE explores wind and turbulence under extreme conditions at the sites of future European bridges paving the road for optimal bridge design. LIKE trains 15 ESRs to an outstanding level at world-leading European academic institutions and industrial companies, thus forming strong interdisciplinary relations between industry and technical sciences. These relations are implemented through employment of the ESRs at academia as well as industry, and through inter-sectoral secondments. Finally, translation of technology into specific applications is emphasised through the implementation of an entrepreneurship training course involving all ESRs and LIKE partners, particularly industry.

In ELICAN, a strong team of complementary European companies with worldwide leading presence in the Wind Energy industry join forces to provide the market with a disruptive high-capacity and cost-reducing integrated substructure system for deep offshore wind energy. The technology is exceptionally fitted to meet the technical and logistical challenges of the sector as it moves into deeper locations with larger turbines, while allowing for drastic cost reduction. This project will design, build, certify and fully demonstrate in operative environment a deep water substructure prototype supporting Adwen’s 5MW offshore wind turbine, the be installed in the Southeast coast of Las Palmas (Canary Islands). It will become the first bottom-fixed offshore wind turbine in all of Southern Europe and the first one worldwide to be installed with no need of heavy-lift vessels. The revolutionary substructure consists in an integrated self-installing precast concrete telescopic tower and foundation that will allow for crane-free offshore installation of the complete substructure and wind turbine, thus overcoming the constraints imposed by the dependence on heavy-lift vessels. It will allow for a full inshore preassembly of the complete system, which is key to generate a highly industrialized low-cost manufacturing process with fast production rates and optimized risk control. The main benefits to be provided by this ground-breaking technology are: • Significant cost reduction (>35%) compared with current solutions. • Direct scalability in terms of turbine size, water depth, infrastructure and installation means. • Complete independence of heavy-lift vessels • Excellently suited for fast industrialized construction. • Robust and durable concrete substructure for reduced OPEX costs and improved asset integrity. • Suitable for most soil conditions, including rocky seabeds. • Enhanced environmental friendliness regarding both impact on sea life and carbon footprint.

Floating offshore wind is still a nascent technology and its LCOE is substantially higher than onshore and bottom-fixed offshore wind, and thus requires to be drastically reduced. The COREWIND project aims to achieve significant cost reductions and enhance performance of floating wind technology through the research and optimization of mooring and anchoring systems and dynamic cables. These enhancements arisen within the project will be validated by means of simulations and experimental testing both in the wave basin tanks and the wind tunnel by taking as reference two concrete-based floater concepts (semi-submersible and spar) supporting large wind turbines (15 MW), installed at water depths greater than 40 m and 90 m for the semi-submersible and spar concept, respectively. Special focus is given to develop and validate innovative solutions to improve installation techniques and operation and maintenance (O&M) activities. They will prove the benefits of concrete structures to substantially reduce the LCOE by at least15% compared to the baseline case of bottom-fixed offshore wind, both in terms of CAPEX and OPEX. Additionally, the project will provide guidelines and best design practices, as well as open data models to accelerate the further development of concrete-based semi-submersible and spar FOWTs, based on findings from innovative cost-effective and reliable solutions for the aforementioned key aspects. It is aimed that the resulting recommendations will facilitate the cost-competitiveness of floating offshore wind energy, reducing risks and uncertainties and contributing to lower LCOE estimates. COREWIND aims to strength the European Leadership on wind power technology (and specially floating). To do so, the project consortium has been designed to ensure proper collaboration between all stakeholders (users, developers, suppliers, academia, etc.) which is essential to accelerate commercialization of the innovations carried out in the project.

Current practice in wind turbines operation is that every turbine has its own controller that optimizes its own performance in terms of energy capture and loading. This way of operating wind farms means that each wind turbine operates based only on the available information on its own measurements. This gets the wind farm to operate in a non-optimum way, since wind turbines are not operating as players of a major system. The major reasons for this non-optimum approach of wind farms operation are based on the lack of knowledge and tools which can model the dynamics of the flow inside the wind farm, how wind turbines modifies this flow, and how the wind turbines are affected by the perturbed flow. In addition, this lack of tools deals to also a lack of advanced control solutions, because there are not any available tool which can help on developing and testing virtually advanced control concepts for wind farms. CL-WINDCON will bring up with new innovative solutions based on wind farm open and closed loop advanced control algorithms which will enable to treat the entire wind farm as a unique integrated optimization problem. This will be possible thanks to the development of appropriate dynamic tools for wind farm simulation, at a reasonable computing effort. These tools for wind farm dynamic modelling of wind farm models will be fully open source at the end of the project, while control algorithms will be extensively validated simulations, in wind tunnel tests. Some open loop validations will be performed at wind farm level tests. Proposed control algorithms, useful for future but also for already existing wind farms. Then these will improve the LCOE, as well as the O&M costs will decrease, and improves in terms of reliability the wind turbine and wind farm. These performance improvements will be evaluated for both, wind turbine operation and wind farm operation.